Bloomberg's Carlson: Forget Morality, Bishops Need to Foucs on Economy, Climate Change...

I have chronicled the godawful stuff that masquerades as opinion journalism that emanates from the keyboard of Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg News.  In my view, she doesn't even manage to achieve broken clock status by being right once in a while by default.  Today she's out with another howler of a column, but times are busy here at the real job, so I'll leave it to Ed at Hot Air to point out the obvious.

This probably deserves a full-scale fisking, but I’m pressed for time today.  Margaret Carlson seems very annoyed at the priorities set by Catholic bishops in opposing a law that forces Catholics and other people of faith to violate their religious doctrine.  But, er, whose priorities exactly are out of whack here?

U.S. Catholic bishops have a lot to worry about: the gunning down of children; 11 million undocumented immigrants, many of them Catholic; a warming planet; a chilly economy. Instead they’ve spent the last year obsessed with contraception.

Shouldn’t the phrase “US Catholic bishops” be replaced by “Washington DC”?  After all, the Catholic Church doesn’t have the temporal power to solve the problems of immigration policy or “a chilly economy.”  Those issues are the purview of the state — on which the bishops can and actually do comment and propose solutions, regardless of Carlson’s ignorance of the rather easily-accesible USCCB website.

On the other hand, we have a President who spent all of last year insisting that women couldn’t access birth control without the government forcing employers to provide it for free, despite solid evidence from a 20-year study by the CDC that the issue of access was practically non-existent.  The same President won’t even acknowledge that the economy is “chilly” after four years of Obamanomics.  And it’s the bishops whose priorities are not in line?

Carlson goes on at length to argue that Obama fixed all of their concerns with the HHS mandate, which simply isn’t true, and in fact may have made things a little worse. Maybe Carlson should tell Obama to butt out of the free expression of religious faith, and spend more time on Carlson’s priorities instead.